


touch

by lando_cal_rice_ian



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Abandonment, Blind Character, F/M, Gen, Light Angst, Touch-Starved, i don't know what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2019-12-03
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:55:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21653332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lando_cal_rice_ian/pseuds/lando_cal_rice_ian
Summary: Mando knows little of touch, and so does she.
Relationships: The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)/Reader, The Mandalorian/OC
Comments: 16
Kudos: 244





	touch

**Author's Note:**

> i was bored, i couldn't sleep, was drugged up on sleeping pills — and voila, whatever tf this is, came into existence.

It’s dusk when he leaves the camp. The creature who called himself the Leader had not been loose-lipped, and had it not been for the credits that Mando — he hadn’t heard his name, his _real_ name, spoken in some time — flicked into his grasping hands, what precious information he’d come to find would not have left that waggling tongue. 

Footprints are faded in the sand, evidence of life that has now rushed into homes to be sheltered from the cold. He feels little of the chill, his armour warm, and is far too determined to get to his ship to stop for the night. He thinks once, no perhaps twice, that he should have been rougher, forced the creature to talk instead of waiting so long with careful coaxing. He’s tired — though he won’t admit it. 

His ship is not too far, but far enough for this trek to feel troublesome. Mando encounters another camp, and wonders if he _should_ turn in, as the sand in the distance swells and shifts from movement underneath. Worms — he wasn’t much fond of them. 

But he pushes on. Tired is a state he is accustomed to, and he’d walked worse distances beaten and bloodied. 

No other life, save for the worms, greet him past that camp. He watches for their movement under the sand and avoids such areas, and it’s not long before he’s just a little ways from his ship. 

And here, where the expanse has turned frigid, he spies a lone figure hunched in the sand, illuminated by the three moons. Something lies at their feet. A threat — he first thinks. An ambush, perhaps. 

He zooms in, but it takes a moment to register that it’s a girl, bent over a motionless creature that looks to be a mount. 

Mando hesitates. Even as he grows closer, she doesn’t look up at him. He can move further from her, establish a distance so she understands he doesn’t wish to communicate. And he does so (fingers flexing near his blaster), but, as he is walking past, she suddenly perks up, and glances in his direction — or... a little off, just to his left. 

“Hello?” Things clatter around her when she stands — scraps, bits and pieces of abandoned pods he thinks she’ll either sell, or use. She takes a step forward: in the wrong direction. “Hello — is someone there? I—I heard footsteps.” 

Mando realises later than he should have that the girl cannot see. The distant look in her eyes becomes more evident as she steps closer, though not quite towards him. 

“Please. My darling Geeba, she, I don’t know, I don’t know what’s happened to her. She fell. And then she just... stopped breathing.” 

Mando watches as she wanders, arms outstretched, that look of panic on her face one he’s seen too many times. It takes him a while to answer, he doesn’t quite know why — she stops in her tracks as soon as his voice sounds from an angle different to the one she’d been heading in. 

“My ship’s not too far. Which camp are you from?” He’s curt. But she doesn’t notice, or doesn’t feel offended if she does. 

“I—but, what about Geeba?” 

There’s not much to bury the beast in except the sand. But there was no doubt she would be food for the worms above or below it. Moving her isn’t an option. The answer, he knows, will break the girl’s heart, but it is the truth, and he tells it to her straight. 

“You have to leave her.” 

Quiet — she stills, as if all life has left her, and Mando watched a statue. Her torn cloak flutters in the wind, the cracks of it loud. 

Mando waits. He knows what will come next. 

With a choked sob, she runs, stumbling back in the direction of Geeba. Off course, she cries out, desperate to find the beast, finding instead scraps of metal that catch under her shoes and send her to her knees. 

A defeated wail, and then a burst of grief-fuelled rage, and she at last settles down, resigned to call over her shoulder, “Thank you. I’ll come,” feeling the vibrations under her hands that warn of impending danger. 

He hesitates at first, but approaches her to guide her to her feet. Her hand instinctively reaches for him, and finds his side, slips past until she has a grip on his cape, and Mando sees now the scar of an outcast on her cheek. 

It is a while, when she whispers, “I live north of here, the direction Ge—Geeba is facing. It’s the small camp. Just the one tent. That’s my home.” 

When he turns, she stumbles a little, but manages to fall into step behind him as he leads her to his ship. The hatch hisses open and she startles, closing the distance between them further, he can almost feel the warmth of her through the parts of his armour not made of Beskar. He shrugs her off once on board. 

“You can sit in the cockpit.” He glances towards her and notices her hand searching for him again. “This way,” he calls. And he waits, as she traces his steps with the fleeting sound of his voice to where he stands. 

The ladder, he realises, as they come upon it, will be a task. He asks her if she will sit down here, but she takes a rung above her head, and her foot, after some struggles, finds another. Mando takes a step back to allow her to climb, but as she tries to find a rung above with her other foot, she slips, and he’s quick to catch her. There is a loud sound — something striking steel — and he realises, when she hisses in pain, that her elbow has hit his armour. He steadies her on her feet, and guides her to a seat. 

“Stay here.” 

The girl smiles. It’s a surprising sight, though there is no joy nor humour in it. The scar of her brand grows taut across her cheek. “What help would I be finding my camp anyway, huh.” 

He’s quiet. She turns her head, leans into the wall and closes her eyes. Mando is halfway up into the cockpit when he hears her say, “Still dark.” 

There is no noise from her below after he has started the ship. Almost as if she doesn’t exist. But keeping to his word, he travels north, watching for tell-tale signs of a camp — a challenge, for he knows it’ll be small, tucked somewhere the worms cannot get to. 

At last, he finds it. A lone tent, big enough to fit not just her but also her mount. As if that matters now... 

The ship touches down a little distance from the camp, unable to get between the jagged mountains that house it. Mando descends down the ladder, to find the girl touching the face of a bounty from another planet, his expression one of horror captured in Carbon Freezing. 

She doesn’t ask him questions. Mando takes her elbow, the one not sore, and guides her to the hatch. The chill is a sharp welcome back as the two leave the ship, and Mando, for a second, feels guilty for not having thought to find her a blanket. But she is soon before her tent, and the signs of a fire now put out is near. 

“Thank you.” He turns to the sound of her voice just as he notices her hands, and he cannot speak or step away before she has placed them on his head. The surprise is clear on her face, but it is soon replaced with a curious look. “A helmet?” 

Mando tries to be gentle when he removes her hands from him. They’re cold through his gloves. He knows what she had meant to do — he noticed the culture of this planet, the creature he went to see also attempted to bid him farewell the same way: the touching of foreheads, a warm goodbye. 

“This is the way.” But there is no recognition of the saying in her expression. How long had she been out here without friends? Save for a beast who could not talk and would know just as much as she about Mandalore and its culture. 

“I have to go.” 

She holds her hands together in front of her, but their trembling is obvious. The solitude of the camp becomes all at once distinct. He takes a step back, and it grows more dismal. This isn’t the way of her planet, he knows — to be alone is to suffer. 

A moment passes; her small voice ends it. “Are you still there?” 

Another moment, and then Mando replies, “Yes.” 

“I didn’t kill someone, if that’s what you’re wondering.” Wringing her hands leaves red marks on her tanned skin. There are scars there too: injuries from her exile alone that have healed poorly. “I just asked the wrong questions.” 

What questions, he finds he wants to know. What could have been so terrible for her camp to turn her out. 

“I’m sorry.” It’s all he can manage. 

Their arms brush when he walks past her to the doused campfire. There are logs near the tent, and though most that are sold to outcasts are unwanted, lacking quality, hers do light — a rare compassion from a trader. He feels her presence at his side once the fire crackles to life. 

Her hand finds the crook of his elbow. “Thank you.” 

Mando stares at the flame, golden-orange, a splash of colour in the blue night. Focusing on it doesn’t make him ignore the touch however; there is no Beskar there where his elbow bends, and he feels her cold skin through even the thick fabric. 

Dirt turns the dark fabric at his knees brown in the firelight. He stands, and her hand slips from his arm. There’s a bounty to catch, he has no time to sit idle beside a stranger at a campfire. As if aware of his intention to leave, the girl reaches out once more, upwards towards where Mando looks down at her, and he comes to realise she still wishes to bid him the proper farewell, a piece of culture she has held on to all this time. 

Touch is foreign to him. Though, it had not always been so. Before he was a foundling, he had known it — but it had been a long time since then. 

And perhaps, he thinks, it’s foreign now to her too. 

“It makes no difference to me,” she tells him, gentle, “whether your helmet is on.” A gesture the Leader had not shown him, his webbed hands reaching from his bathing pond to take the Mandalorian’s helmet off. 

After a pause, he says, low, “Goodbye.” 

The girl smiles. There are tears running down her cheeks, he realises; whether in grief for her sole friend or in pain of her exile, or — guilt stabs at him — due to his refusal of a custom she has long been distanced from, he doesn’t know. 

Her hands fall to her lap. 

“Goodbye,” she mirrors. “What a sad word.” 

And with that, she walks to her tent. 

Mando wonders if this is a kindness, as he walks back to his ship, to save him from  the  remorse  of  turn ing his back to her lonesome figure , leaving behind a parting left incomplete.  He does not have to think of her, kneeling by the fire, listening to his footsteps disappear.

The ship is no different with or without her, it’s quiet as it usually is without a chattering bounty desperate to be released. He flicks the switches, pushes the buttons, and doesn’t look towards her camp as he takes off into the sky. 

—

The tent is gone when he returns. 

There is no sign of her existence, not even a fire put out, no footprints, no materials left behind, nothing to say she had been here, and, for a moment, so had he. 

He goes to the humanoid camp nearest to where she had been, but it proves futile — no one speaks of outcasts, to them they are dead. In another and another and another it is much the same. He goes to the Leader he met before, and not even credits can entice him to speak. 

Mando returns to his ship with nothing. Nothing but memories he now questions. 

A phantom seems a ridiculous conclusion. She’d been real. She was just gone. 

Regret gnaws at him, and he hopes that she’s gone somewhere far from here, to another planet where her brand means nothing — an old scar she can soon forget amongst people who will never cast her out again. Or leave her behind, as he had. 

He leaves, and wills himself to forget it all this time: To forget her. To forget what could have been.


End file.
